WASHINGTON - Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year's presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order — and hope. Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, "Yes, we can."

Even so, a battered public seems discouraged by the onslaught of dispiriting things. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll says a barrel-scraping 17 percent of people surveyed believe the country is moving in the right direction. That is the lowest reading since the survey began in 2003.

An ABC News-Washington Post survey put that figure at 14 percent, tying the low in more than three decades of taking soundings on the national mood.

"It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change."

Recent natural disasters around the world dwarf anything afflicting the U.S. Consider that more than 69,000 people died in the China earthquake, and that 78,000 were killed and 56,000 missing from the Myanmar cyclone.

Americans need do no more than check the weather, look in their wallets or turn on the news for their daily reality check on a world gone haywire.

Floods engulf Midwestern river towns. Is it global warming, the gradual degradation of a planet's weather that man seems powerless to stop or just a freakish late-spring deluge?

It hardly matters to those in the path. Just ask the people of New Orleans who survived Hurricane Katrina. They are living in a city where, 1,000 days after the storm, entire neighborhoods remain abandoned, a national embarrassment that evokes disbelief from visitors.

Food is becoming scarcer and more expensive on a worldwide scale, due to increased consumption in growing countries such as China and India and rising fuel costs. That can-do solution to energy needs — turning corn into fuel — is sapping fields of plenty once devoted to crops that people need to eat. Shortages have sparked riots. In the U.S., rice prices tripled and some stores rationed the staple.

Residents of the nation's capital and its suburbs repeatedly lose power for extended periods as mere thunderstorms rumble through. In California, leaders warn people to use less water in the unrelenting drought.

Want to get away from it all? The weak U.S. dollar makes travel abroad forbiddingly expensive. To add insult to injury, some airlines now charge to check luggage.

Want to escape on the couch? A writers' strike halted favorite TV shows for half a season. The newspaper on the table may soon be a relic of the Internet age. Just as video stores are falling by the wayside as people get their movies online or in the mail.

Stay tuned for less than pristine tales from the drug-addled Tour de France and who knows what from the Summer Olympics.

It's not the first time Americans have felt a loss of control.

Alger, the dime-novel author whose heroes overcame adversity to gain riches and fame, played to similar anxieties when the U.S. was becoming an industrial society in the late 1800s.

American University historian Allan J. Lichtman notes that the U.S. has endured comparable periods and worse, including the economic stagflation (stagnant growth combined with inflation) and Iran hostage crisis of 1980; the dawn of the Cold War, the Korean War and the hysterical hunts for domestic Communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and the Depression of the 1930s.

"All those periods were followed by much more optimistic periods in which the American people had their confidence restored," he said. "Of course, that doesn't mean it will happen again."

Each period also was followed by a change in the party controlling the White House.

This period has seen intense interest in the presidential primaries, especially the Democrats' five-month duel between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Records were shattered by voters showing up at polling places, yearning for a voice in who will next guide the country as it confronts the uncontrollable.

Never mind that their views of their current leaders are near rock bottom, reflecting a frustration with Washington's inability to solve anything. President Bush barely gets the approval of three in 10 people, and it's even worse for the Democratic-led Congress.

Why the vulnerability? After all, this is the 21st century, not a more primitive past when little in life was assured. Surely people know how to fix problems now.

Maybe. And maybe this is what the 21st century will be about — a great unraveling of some things long taken for granted.

We can build levees, dams, and other flood-control apparatus that gives us the illusion of control - but it's just that, an illusion. All these measures were built to solve some past or future conceived problem - not the problem nobody conceived. They were also not built to address the failure of one or more links in the protective chain. And (and this is a bigAND" these thing shave to be maintained - at great expense.

Likewise New Orleans - a city built below sea level on a coast known to have hurricanes. Note that many of the old portions of New Orleans were largely untouched by the devastation. Why? We built a city below sea level that was protected by levees, dikes, and canals that were clearly known to not be up to a category five hurricane for years before Katrina. Katrina was an eventuality - it was going to happen, it was just a question of when. We naively think we can control nature and build a city below sea level that is impervious to hurricane-driven rains, wind, and surges.

California wildfires - a natural part of that ecosystem that we now label a "disaster" because somebody built a $1MM house there. Duh. Ditto earthquakes and lack of water - somebody decided to build cities in an earthquake-prone arid area with little to no groundwater that is subject to regular wildfires - and then acts surprised when one of the known events occurs.

Yes carefully constructed at that. I have wondered the same thing, so no you are not alone. You see the lies about Obomma that keep getting shown and people just turn a blind eye. Like nothing was said. People do not think about what is happening and just say oh well I am fine or it does not affect me and just keep on living. What is the answer who knows but people better wake up and see what is going on around them and see how it DOES affect there life.

We can build levees, dams, and other flood-control apparatus that gives us the illusion of control - but it's just that, an illusion. All these measures were built to solve some past or future conceived problem - not the problem nobody conceived. They were also not built to address the failure of one or more links in the protective chain. And (and this is a bigAND" these thing shave to be maintained - at great expense.

Likewise New Orleans - a city built below sea level on a coast known to have hurricanes. Note that many of the old portions of New Orleans were largely untouched by the devastation. Why? We built a city below sea level that was protected by levees, dikes, and canals that were clearly known to not be up to a category five hurricane for years before Katrina. Katrina was an eventuality - it was going to happen, it was just a question of when. We naively think we can control nature and build a city below sea level that is impervious to hurricane-driven rains, wind, and surges.

California wildfires - a natural part of that ecosystem that we now label a "disaster" because somebody built a $1MM house there. Duh. Ditto earthquakes and lack of water - somebody decided to build cities in an earthquake-prone arid area with little to no groundwater that is subject to regular wildfires - and then acts surprised when one of the known events occurs.

Yes, good points.

The problem isn't that the river flooded, it's that we build things in places that flood.
The problem isn't that the ground shook, it's that we built on shaky ground.

But doesn't this line of thinking then led you to the very liberal greenie hippey-esque way of thinking that the solution is for us to learn to try to live WITH nature rather than trying to CONTROL nature?

Also doesn't this also suggest that at the root of the problem is the fact that we've used technology to push the planet to support more humans than it is naturally capable of supporting, and that eventually nature will win and that the result will be a massive die-off of humans?

But doesn't this line of thinking then led you to the very liberal greenie hippey-esque way of thinking that the solution is for us to learn to try to live WITH nature rather than trying to CONTROL nature?

Then sign me up for the hacky sack tournament, because I am on board.

Stuff is getting expensive, people are failing hard with debt and mortgages. This is stuff that has always been around in one form or another. I don't think we are looking at the great depression, and a hard recession is in the hands of the consumers at this point.

Stuff is getting expensive, people are failing hard with debt and mortgages. This is stuff that has always been around in one form or another. I don't think we are looking at the great depression, and a hard recession is in the hands of the consumers at this point.

I sometimes wonder if were going to go straight past "recession", past "depression" and continue on to a new dark ages.

Stuff is getting expensive, people are failing hard with debt and mortgages. This is stuff that has always been around in one form or another. I don't think we are looking at the great depression, and a hard recession is in the hands of the consumers at this point.

Yes I do think that we are headed for more hard times before it gets better maybe it will be nice by 2011???